Think that improving your long term memory is all brain training and omega-3 supplements? Think again. A new study from researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta suggests that working out at the gym for as little as 20 minutes can improve long-term memory.

Previous studies have shown that memory may be improved by several months of aerobic exercises, such as running, cycling or swimming. However, the findings of the new study – published in the journal Acta Psychologica – demonstrate that a similar memory boost can be achieved in a much shorter period.

“Our study indicates that people don’t have to dedicate large amounts of time to give their brain a boost,” says Lisa Weinberg, the Georgia Tech graduate student who led the project.

As well as looking at aerobic exercise, Weinberg’s team also examined how resistance exercise – weightlifting, push-ups and sit-ups – might affect memory.

The team recruited 46 participants (29 women and 17 men), who were randomly assigned into two groups. For the first part of the experiment, all participants viewed a series of 90 images on a computer screen.

These images were split evenly been photographs that had been classed “positive,” “neutral,” and “negative.” These ranged from pictures of children playing on a waterslide, to photographs of clocks, to images of mutilated bodies. The participants were asked to try and remember as many of them as they could.

Next, the participants were randomized into “active” and “passive” groups and seated at leg extension resistance exercise machines.

The active group were told to extend and contract each leg 50 times, at their personal maximum effort. The passive group were told to simply sit in the chair and allow the machine to move their legs.

The blood pressure and heart rate of the participants were monitored, and saliva samples were collected.

‘Active’ group showed improved recall of images

Two days later, the participants were again shown the original 90 images they had seen previously, but this time they were mixed in with 90 new photos that the participants had not seen before.

The researchers found about 50% of the original photos were recalled by the passive group, while the active group remembered about 60% of the images.

All of the participants were better at recalling the positive and negative images than the neutral images, but this was even more true for the active participants. The researchers suggest that this is because people are more likely to remember emotional experiences following short-term stress.

The team believes their results are consistent with previous research in a rodent model that found stress responses result in releases of norepinephrine – a hormone that may improve memory.

Analyzing the saliva from the participants, the team found that the active group showed increased levels of alpha amylase in their saliva – a marker of norepinephrine.

Depressive symptoms in particular, but also chronic stress in life, increase the risk of older people having a stroke or transient ischemic attack, says researchers, who found feelings of hostility, but not anger, were also a risk factor for cerebrovascular disease.

The study of over 6,700 people aged between 45 and 84 years, reported in the American Heart Association’s journal Stroke, compared the rates of full and mini-stroke between people of different psychological profiles rated via questionnaire.

Compared with people who had healthy psychological scores, those with the poorest scores showed the following percentage increases in their likelihood of suffering a stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA):

On the effect of feelings of hostility – “which is a negative way of viewing the world” and was assessed by the person’s “cynical expectations of other people’s motives” – this resulted in a doubling of the risk versus people who did not score highly on this profile. Feelings of anger, however, had no effect.

Dr. Susan Everson-Rose, lead author and associate professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, says:

“There’s such a focus on traditional risk factors – cholesterol levels, blood pressure, smoking and so forth – and those are all very important, but studies like this one show that psychological characteristics are equally important.”

The chronic stress was measured using ratings for five different domains of the participants’ lives:

Personal health problems

Health problems of people close to them

Job or ability to work

Relationships

Finances.

Decade-long study covered six American cities

The data for this analysis came from a study across six US sites known as the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis.

The 6,749 participants were from a mix of ethnic backgrounds across Baltimore, MD, Chicago, IL, Forsyth County, NC, Los Angeles, CA, New York City, NY, and Saint Paul, MN.

The almost equal numbers of men and women showed no evidence of cardiovascular disease at the start of the research in the early 2000s.

During the first 2 years of the recruitment, the baseline ratings of depression and chronic stress were assessed, and the subjects were monitored for an additional 8.5 to 11 years.

During the study, 147 strokes and 48 TIAs occurred, and the researchers did a statistical analysis at the end to compare the rates of disease between different levels of psychological health.

Possible biological mechanisms

The authors say they have excluded the possibility that the stroke results could be explained by poor psychological health tending to have a bad effect on physical lifestyle (people experiencing “stress and negative emotions typically have more adverse behavioral risk profiles, and experience difficulty in maintaining healthy lifestyles and adhering to treatment recommendations”).

The lifestyle factors taken into account were:

Smoking

Physical activity

Alcohol consumption

Body mass index

Blood pressure.

Independent of these factors, if depression and stress can be assumed to have a direct causal effect on stroke, then, the authors offer only theoretical ideas about what the biological link might be.

“Stress and negative emotions activate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis,” they write, and this activation of the brain’s stress center influences blood clotting, among a number of other effects listed in the paper.

But these factors were not tested in the study. Another pathway that was tested, that of inflammatory effects, was tested to some extent, but “little evidence” was shown for it.

The head and the heart of people who suffer from high levels of anxiety react to stressful situations differently, researchers at the University of Birmingham have found.

The research, which was presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society, showed that the way people with high levels of anxiety feel that they are responding to a task and the way their body actually responds to the task are not related to each other.

Researchers from the School of Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation Sciences, measured general everyday anxiety levels in 180 adolescents and then recorded their heart rate while they were resting and during a psychological stress task, such as a maths test under time pressure with social evaluation, in the laboratory. They used the difference between heart rate during the stress task compared to rest to determine their actual biological responses.

They found that people with higher anxiety in everyday life reported higher somatic symptoms (eg, feeling that their heart is racing) immediately before and during the stress task. However, there were no associations between people’s actual biological responses to stress and somatic symptoms during stress. There were also no associations between people’s biological responses and general anxiety.

Although working mothers and fathers are almost as likely to think about family matters throughout the day, only for mothers is this type of mental labor associated with increased stress and negative emotions, according to new research to be presented at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

“I assume that because mothers bear the major responsibility for childcare and family life, when they think about family matters, they tend to think about the less pleasant aspects of it — such as needing to pick up a child from daycare or having to schedule a doctor’s appointment for a sick kid — and are more likely to be worried,” said study author Shira Offer, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

Much has been written about the unequal division of household labor and childcare, but the overwhelming majority of studies in this field examine specific behaviors, Offer said. “These studies focus on the physical aspect of tasks and demands, which can be measured and quantified relatively easily,” she said. “However, much of the work we do, both paid and unpaid, takes place in our mind. We are often preoccupied with the things we have to do, we often worry about them, and feel stressed not to forget to do them or to do them on time. These thoughts and concerns — mental labor — can impair our performance, make it difficult to focus on tasks, and even hurt our sleep. This mental labor is the focus of my study.”

The study relies on data from the 500 Family Study, a multi-method investigation of how middle-class families balance family and work experiences. The 500 Family Study collected comprehensive information from 1999 to 2000 on families living in eight urban and suburban communities across the United States. Most parents in the 500 Family Study are highly educated, employed in professional occupations, and work, on average, longer hours and report higher earnings than do middle-class families in other, nationally representative samples. Although the 500 Family Study is not a representative sample of families in the U.S., it reflects one of the most time pressured segments of the population. Offer’s study uses a subsample from the 500 Family Study, consisting of 402 mothers and 291 fathers in dual-earner families who completed a survey and a time diary that collects information about the content and context of individuals’ daily experiences, as well as the emotions associated with them, in the course of a week.